


Locked Kingdom

by Bubbly_Kandy



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Ethan Garvin Is Jewish, Im gay and i love this ship, M/M, first person POV, for hailey + chris, gjgjngegj this is kinda terrible sorry, mentions of drug abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 12:32:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13271529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bubbly_Kandy/pseuds/Bubbly_Kandy
Summary: My life, at times, was like the happiest of kingdoms... but, doesn't tradegy always strike at the most inappropriate of times?





	Locked Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heereandqueer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heereandqueer/gifts), [heartshapedcookie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartshapedcookie/gifts).



When I was young, I was never one to play outdoors. I was a quiet, orderly child; though ‘orderly’ is most probably not the word to use for me… I was messy, losing objects in my room like I was a small puppy, losing a sock or homework or my shirt. Perhaps the word ‘introverted’ describes me best, for I am one to sit inside and listen to my music, or others among the auditory pleasures; songs, speeches, etc.

 

As I grew, I suppose I became neater to the joy of my mother; I stopped losing things, I went outdoors more, and I made ‘friends;’ people whom I understood better than others, other children who didn’t think that my habits were weird, and instead intriguing. We would spend hours listening to music and speeches; one of my friends was from Israel, (I am Jewish by blood; however, I was born in America) and we both made the group listen to speeches in Hebrew as they and I whispered the English translation, the four of us whispering under the cover of darkness in a tent outdoors, soon having to run inside to escape the cold. We then hide in my room, finishing the speech and falling asleep shortly afterwards. Those were always the happiest days of my young life; once I grew older, leaving my friends behind, I mourned the loss of the best parts of my childhood. 

 

My father was never there to raise me, only in spirit; he called me every week, always at the same time; the reason being so that I could charge my phone, the both of us knowing that the battery would be close to gone after we finished. We discussed mundane things; tests, health, relationships… However, nothing was boring to my father and I. He was talented in the way of making everything interesting, everything funny, everything  _ useful.  _

 

A goal of mine is to be important; I want to be remembered, not as one that stood to the sidelines, but as one who made a difference. I want people to remember my name as one who was useful; not as one who did small chores to change things. 

 

Perhaps that’s the reason I joined Sharpshooter.

 

I was always different, I suppose… My hearing has always been sensitive and radar-esque, allowing me to hear things others could not. I could hear what a group of girls were giggling about from across the hallway, allowing me to be a spy for boys who were crushing on a girl; I always would point out the difference in car alarms to my mother, though she never seemed to care; and I could hear the one person in show choir who was off-pitch, therefore making me a help to our theatre director and choir teacher.

 

Though, sometimes, the hearing got to be too much for me. Some days, a mere whisper could bring me closer and closer to tears, the sound seemingly scraping inside of my skull, bouncing off every neuron inside of my brain before fading in a dissonance, another sound following its tortuous path. Though the noises were the auditory equivalent of breaking a bone, I never showed pain; I tried to keep a blank mask, only allowing my eye to twitch as my traitorous ears picked up another sound that made me want to scratch my ears until they bled.

 

A blessing and a curse, indeed.

 

When I came to be twenty-nine years old, I finally was able to handle the Sharpshooter programming without a guide; three years of learning precisely how to spot every last detail in soundwaves paid off as I stepped into my first day of being alone in my office, only me and the recorded gunshots from around the city. My job was always criticized; “Why,” People would ask me, “Do you listen to what could possibly be killing someone?” 

 

The answer? I don’t know. 

 

I have always, I suppose, had a morbid fascination with death; the sheer number of ways someone could be killed, where the spirit goes after death; it frightened and fascinated me ever since I was eight years old. 

 

But, when my father died, I couldn’t bear to go back to thinking about it… Death became a thing of anxiety to me, the mere mention of it causing tears to well up before I pushed them back down. I didn’t cry when I went to the funeral; I only cried before, allowing a few tears to slip, then I ran to lock myself in my room when my mother told me. I think she found a small amount of joy in the fact that I had shown  _ sadness, _ something that had become rare in my teenage years, unlike my peers. 

 

Though my mother never spoke of my father the way he spoke of her, with honor and respect, she still allowed me to cover every mirror in our house and allowed me to take part in Sitting Shiva at my stepmother’s residence, letting me skip school and stay the full seven days with my father’s side of the family. I was the only one who didn’t show their tears to everyone; when it started to feel like I was suffocating with my grief, I waited until all of my cousins nearby to me were sleeping, then I let silent tears drop, staring at the wall with my pillow covering my mouth. 

 

I am ethnically Jewish; my mother isn’t a daily practitioner of the Jewish faith (we only celebrate Hanukkah, and I did have a Bar Mitzvah,) but my father was. He taught me how to read from the Torah, and he never ate anything that wasn’t Kosher. (My mother followed the rules of Kosher, but there were times where I had to remind her that she couldn’t eat something due to it having pork in it.) My father never forgot. 

 

My father never thought my hearing was odd; he only said that it was my special thing, since everyone, in his mind, had an special thing about them. He always told me to never think I wasn’t important; because my hearing could save someone’s life, and, stemming from that,  _ I  _ could save someone’s life. 

 

After my father’s death, sleep simply… fell out of importance for me. I barely ever slept, starting from Junior year in high school; I discovered that I could do more work at night, and I could simply eat food and drink coffee to keep myself awake. 

 

Fainting started happening in college, despite all of the coffee I put into my system. I would be typing on my computer one minute, then have fellow peers waking me up the next; I would often wake up with my head in someone’s lap, my vision fuzzy and a throbbing starting in the back of my head. 

 

I brushed off the concern that mounted against me all five years of college; my deadly sin being Pride, therefore making me closed off from the world. 

 

I soon started getting a prescription for tiny, yellow pills; medicine to keep me from fainting, stimulating my brain as some ADHD medications do. I, however, don’t have ADHD, but instead not-being-able-to-stay-awake-during-the-day. I take two pills per day; one in the morning, with my breakfast, and one during lunch. They’re  _ slightly  _ illegal, having been imported from Japan and given to me by a person that I believe has never been to medical school, but they work, and that’s all that matters to me.

 

I had been doing just fine on my own; getting my work done, going home, chipping away slowly at seemingly never-ending paperwork, then staying awake all night watching Netflix and such, but then Mister Ben Garcia walked- well, stumbled- into my life. Was the fall my fault? Probably. Did I have any idea about what was going to happen next? No.

 

Ben Garcia was a man that I met at a coffee shop, a man who had ink smudged on his hands and who smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, who had a messy mane of hair barely held back with a ponytail that was probably put in a week or so ago and not thought of since. It was clear that he was a journalist; his computer had multiple tabs containing articles from the last week, and he has the  _ look  _ to him; smart, sleep-deprived, with a bright light in his eyes. 

 

We talked for an hour, then he offered his number; I was like a teenage girl with how I reacted, which I still regret. However, he thankfully didn’t care, and we started to text that very night. 

 

After three months of getting to know each other, I started to feel something for him, and after eight months of us knowing each other, we began to date, him moving into my apartment and going right to work to clean the place. He was very energetic, and I seemingly had a new apartment at the week’s end.

 

We argue, of course, as all couples do; mostly it’s one of us telling the other to get some damn sleep, other times it’s him trying to wean me off of my little yellow pills. They haven’t killed me yet, and I have found no differences in my routine; to which he tells me the various varieties of cancerous tumors that give off no warning signs until it’s too late, though with that argument, I booked my first doctor’s appointment in seven years to please him. He’s making me soft, and I, surprisingly, have no issue with that. 

 

However, happiness and peace never last forever; the day that I nearly died but the shock didn’t hit me until I was at home, Ben looking panicked and scared for my well being. I nearly brushed him off, as my young college self would do, but then the trauma of the day started to strike me out of nowhere, and the tears that I have tried to keep hidden started to sting my nose and eyes, and a hard, painful lump grew in my throat. I, to my embarrassment, started to shrink, expecting a lecture from Ben, but I could hear Ben’s words tampering out and dying as he saw my sorry state. I knew he saw the blood, and I knew he saw the bruise on my cheek, and I wanted to care, but I really couldn’t, especially after he only muttered out my name, a small, inquiring “Ethan?” 

 

I tried to smile and comfort him, I wanted to assure him that I was alright, but I have a suspicion that my smile looked more of a grimace, because Ben looked the most worried that I have ever seen him; he stood and started walking slowly towards me, and I had to assure myself that it was just Ben,  _ my  _ Ben who would never hurt me and cares for me. I looked up at him; he was now close to me, and I felt the urge to say  _ something- _

 

“I was-” I couldn’t do it. Those two words had to scrape past the ball in my throat, and the pain of that shattered me. I made a sound like a cornered animal whom was so afraid that they couldn’t make a sound other than a squeak, and Ben drew me close to his chest, one hand on my hair and the other on my back, and I knew he could feel the pill bottle that I had snuck out of the house that day.  

 

I tried to explain myself, why I was suddenly showing so much emotion on a seeming normal day, but Ben only hugged me, the touch-starved part of me wanting to lean into his hold as the other part of me wanted to run far, far away, but then Ben held me tighter as I felt my knees go weak. I let him hold me as my chest felt like it was imploding, ripping ugly cries from my body as my whole world crashed down on me, every pain and sorrow I felt surging into my agony.

 

I cried until my eyes felt puffy and painful, my chest still hurting but now slowly reconstructing itself- I imagined pulverised ribs piecing back together, my heart with a poorly-put-on band-aid on it, trying so hard to keep itself beating, and I thanked whatever higher deity that Ben was still there, holding me.

 

My face was crushed to his chest, so I had to wriggle to breathe fully; Ben held me impossibly tighter, and I sufficed to his affection, letting him soothe me wordlessly. Such love I had never experienced before, not even with my father; he was not a strong man, and Ben had considerably more body mass than my father.

 

I started to feel tired; my eyes started shutting of their own accord, and I could barely feel Ben lead me to the bedroom, sit me down on the bed and take off my shoes, making a disgusted sound as he did so. I allowed him to tuck me in as would a parent to a child; I felt the faint touch of him pushing the hair away from my face before I fell asleep willingly, the feeling forgotten and foreign. The pill bottle dug into my side, but when I woke up, ten hours later, the pain was gone, and for the first time, I did not care that Ben took my bottle from me.

  
Maybe Ben is right. I do need to stop taking those pills. Perhaps I'm already on the road to recovery.

**Author's Note:**

> Sfnksfnksfnk this was fueled by my love for Chris and Hailey, along with Will Connolly's music and the fact that I had read 'Jane Eyre' and my thinking was in old-timey talk 
> 
> I hope you liked this!!


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